This is a horror for the entire country – it shows the long-term impact of the eight-year Bush reign of economic terror that Barack Obama has faced — and Mitt Romney will if he ascends to the Presidency. (CNN):

White Americans have 22 times more wealth than blacks — a gap that nearly doubled during the Great Recession. The median household net worth for whites was $110,729 in 2010, versus $4,995 for blacks, according to recently released Census Bureau figures.

Home equity, the primary source of wealth for minorities entering the housing market seeking that American Dream, has declined and the predatory sub-prime market that enriched the industry, has robbed these families of a future.

The main reason blacks and Hispanics did not fare as well during the economic downturn is that home equity makes up more of their wealth than it does for whites. The housing bubble that preceded the collapse pushed up homeownership rates among blacks and Hispanics, who relied more heavily on high-cost subprime loans to finance their purchases.
As a result, the implosion of the real estate market had a more devastating impact on black and Hispanic communities.
Asians, meanwhile, are more concentrated on the West Coast, which was hit harder by the mortgage meltdown. And the arrival of new Asian immigrants in the last decade contributed to the decline in overall wealth, according to Rakesh Kochhar, co-author of the Pew Research Center report on wealth.

Meanwhile, if the message of recovery is jobs, jobs, jobs (something the GOP has spent precious little time on while it wails away on gays, guns and God), Mitt Romney’s past at Bain Capital doesn’t bode well for the folks hurting in this economy. (WaPo):

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

…Speaking at a metalworking factory in Cincinnati last week, Romney cited his experience as a businessman, saying he knows what it would take to bring employers back to the United States. “For me it’s all about good jobs for the American people and a bright and prosperous future,” he said.

…Romney campaign officials repeatedly declined requests to comment on Bain’s record of investing in outsourcing firms during the Romney era. Campaign officials have said it is unfair to criticize Romney for investments made by Bain after he left the firm but did not address those made on his watch. In response to detailed questions about outsourcing investments, Bain spokesman Alex Stanton said, “Bain Capital’s business model has always been to build great companies and improve their operations. We have helped the 350 companies in which we have invested, which include over 100 start-up businesses, produce $80 billion of revenue growth in the United States while growing their revenues well over twice as fast as both the S&P and the U.S. economy over the last 28 years.”

Even when the wealth gap was in slight decline in the 90s and early 2000s it was due to price inflation via the housing bubble, not real wealth creation (or more equitable distribution). It is embarrassing to see someone blame housing policy on Republicans alone. Clinton put in place many policies that encourage an upward (and whiteward) redistribution of wealth. And Obama has done as little as he dares (lest he offend his Wall Street paymasters) to redress this problem. The problem of racial wealth (and income) inequality is so enormous (and unnecessary) it is morally and politically bankrupt to assign blame to only the Republicans. Wake up people. The party of the New Deal is dead. It went into decline 30 years and Obama’s ACA and the 40% tax cut ARRA were the last shovels of dirt covering the corpse.

The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

This article could be considered misleading. Obviously race is very relevant to economic position but to list “White” as 110k without qualifiers gives an entirely false impression of wealth distribution.

The Top 1% own over 40% of all financial wealth, the top 400 own more wealth than the bottom 50% or over 150 million Americans. Most of the 1% are indeed white – not surprising given the inheritance tax has been shredded – but that is in a still majority white country so the numbers aren’t at all uniform as an average. The median net worth is way below the number provided (and dropping) for a clear majority of whites.

If you looked at Europe in the Middle Ages you could say ‘the average Frenchmen must be rich, look at all the wealth produced’ when in reality a small slice of the population – the King and nobles – controlled the wealth. So it is today.

Now somebody remind me–what, specifically, President Obama has done to help Black people or the poorest Americans more generally? Zero. Zip. Nada. Maybe it’s because I have been working and living in and out of the Caribbean since 2001, where people are used to getting f’d over by politicians of all races, but (as someone who voted for him and cried at his inauguration) I am totally consternated by the liberal failure to face up to what this guy is and has done.

“It shows the long-term effect of the Bush 8 year reign of economic terror that Barak Obama has faced…”

The disparity between the wealth of white americans and black americans is despicable and manifestly unfair, but to state or imply that the continuing of it has been imposed on Obama by republicans is, I believe, either mistaken or dishonest.

The truth is that Barack Obama came into office with more of a mandate for real change than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, and then quickly began the process of squandering it.

9 states that had gone republican in 2004, switched to democratic, in 2008.

Obama’s coattails were a mile long, which resulted in a 257-178 count in the House of Representatives—a democratic margin of 79 seats.

In the Senate, the count was 59-41, which gave democrats an 18 seat advantage.

The electoral vote was 365-173, or practically, a doubling of the vote for John McCain.

Whatever economic “reign of terror” Obama inherited, he certainly had the tools AND the mandate to, in no uncertain terms, begin the process of putting an end to it.

This, I submit, he did not do, but instead chose to perform wondrous rehabilitation on a thoroughly whipped and discredited republican party. We can argue about the reason or reasons he did this, but that he did it is really not spinnable, and ignoring it, and implying in any way, that the big, bad, republicans have somehow stolen the political mojo of brave Obama, I think is very mistaken and worse, is encouraging him to even more “bipartisan” governing.

My family history is in North Carolina. Before and after the Civil War they would show the percentage of blacks and white plus who had the money in the census charts. The Whites had all the money. The blacks were from 50% to 80% of the population. The 1% versus the 99% in today’s US is not far off the mark. The 1% have so much money. The same “balance” is true in Russia and we call it the oligarchy.

“During the Clinton years, African Americans saw the greatest economic advances in memory. Over the course of the 1990s, millions of black families joined the middle class. With a booming economy and Clintonian policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which pulled millions of low-income families out of desperation, the poverty rate among African Americans hit its lowest point in U.S. history in 2000. Black poverty fell by more than 10 percentage points between 1993 and 2000, and poverty among African American children dropped by an unprecedented 10.7 percentage points in five years (from 41.9 percent in 1995 to 31.2 percent in 2000).
–Debunking the Big Lie Right-Wingers Use to Justify Black Poverty and Unemployment, by Joshua Holland

I’m not sure breaking down income by race is all that instructive. Actually, you could make a case that the issue has as much to do with savings as anything. I don’t see that Asians or Hispanics have a great advantage compared to Blacks, why is their net worth so much higher.
The tendency to use these sort of metrics to divide what really should be common interests is self defeating. Like the civil rights movement in the 20s refusing to support women’s suffrage.

I think with more analysis you would find the results are really a symptom of lack of income mobility among all groups. With some cultural variations but basically the people with the money have always had the money. The racial divides are merely a type of false flag operation used to keep the 99% from organizing together.

“Subprime” loans, should be replaced with “Exploitation” loans. Floating interest rate loans were intended for people who knew their incomes would be a lot higher in the near future, “interns” for example; who wanted a much more expensive house “now” as opposed to waiting. When the rate went up, so had their incomes.

We have become a predatory society, and Republicans are the top predators. After “victimizing” all of those people by selling them houses that they knew would be foreclosed on after the payments went up, they blamed the victims; but by this time the predators pockets were bulging with commission money and all sorts of other inflated fees associated with buying a house.

Another huge way in which Blacks who owned their homes lost wealth, was when this “depression” hit, it affected black neighborhoods much worse than white neighborhoods. Houses in black neighborhoods couldn’t be sold because no one had any money to buy. If the person who owned a house died, that house was simply left vacant to crumble, this diminished the value of the remaining houses even more.

Barack Obama and so many “Black politicians” are no longer “Black”, consequently they don’t empathize with the black multitudes; especially since they don’t socialize with or live near the “black multitudes”

Slavery, historic racism, the fact that segregation and racial discrimination were LEGAL in much of the country until about thirty-five years ago. Continuing hostility toward them as a people from a sizable portion of the population, including one of the two established political parties, one in three black men with a prison record due in sizable part to discriminatory policing for minor crimes–none of this means anything to ya, huh? Probably feels marginally “instructive” if you’re in a black skin, no? Or one of the one in two (roughly) members of the black middle class who has fallen back into poverty since 2007.

Whaddaloadabunk. And as for sn1789′s “real wealth”: my god! Paper wealth is only okay for the super-rich now, eh? That’s good to know! Give us your definition of wealth, please! Yours must be under you mattress, or only available through backyard global positioning. Or maybe once it’s melted down by some pawnbroker you’ll find yours rather fungible, too? Codswolloping noodles masquerading as liberals. . . your education was a waste–demand your money back!

This cracks me up. Exploitation loans? Why you give a pass to people that obviously bit off far more than they could chew is mind boggling. It was an opportunity at home ownership for millions who thought it was unattainable (white, black, asian, hispanic etc etc). People who acted responsibly were by and far unaffected. Those that made poor decisions based on greed where crushed. Social Darwinism at work. Worst part is many of those people would make those same bad financial decisions over and over and over again.

Primary education needs to worry less about teaching geography and history and more about teaching common sense.

An insatiable global appetite for packaged pools of high-risk mortgages was a significant contributor to the financial crisis, not the subprime loans themselves, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told a government-appointed inquiry panel in defense of his tenure on Wednesday.

This is a horror for the entire country – it shows the long-term impact of the eight-year Bush reign of economic terror that Barack Obama has faced — and Mitt Romney will if he ascends to the Presidency.

No, it doesn’t show that. What would perhaps show that was a year-by-year comparison, yet you quote Obama-era figures to show how bad Bush was. It’s Obama who has the 22 times gap. You don’t offer a comparison between 2008 – the last year Bush was in office – and 2009 through the present to demonstrate that Obama wasn’t in fact part of the problem who contributed to making it worse.

When I sold real estate, we never even bothered to consider anything other than a 30 year fixed rate loan for our clients. We considered those adjustable rate loans “predatory”. However, if you are in the “predatory” class, it’s always the victims fault because you preyed upon him; he should have known better.

One would have to assume that if the Obama White House is following the Bush admin’s lead and making good billionaires’ bank losses to the TUNE of billions but letting poor people (including people of color, and in disproportionately high numbers) lose their homes, savings, college funds (see my daughter) and retirement savings (see my wife and myself) that the Bush gap (which is a good old function of how capitalism works even in good times without Keynesian intervention). . . has not only increased under Obama but as a direct result of his various interventions and/or lack thereof. We know there were various liberal gestures the Bush people offered to make toward the markets before Obama took office and that they were asked not to. The writing was on the wall with Summers, Geithner, and Emanuel from day one; some still haven’t learned to read.

Disingenuous and naive to suggest that it’s some baleful inheritance that Obama has borne despite some imagined good intentions–your imagination has to be very good indeed at this stage. Early on it was whispered that Obama wasn’t up to much on the economic front, that Summers was bullying him. But after four years I think we can assume he understands the general impact of policies for which he, in the end, is responsible. Not aiding unions, which would help increase real and lasting wealth, not a penny for New Orleans, no genuine help for underwater homeowners–not even any real spending on infrastructure, which might save capitalism’s decrepit and hemmhorhoidal ass. The list is long and deep. I think it’s safe to say that Obama swallowed the Freedmanite poison in Chi and never looked back. (He developed a good fake African-American dialect for speeches there, too, but he doesn’t dare trot that out much these days.) The continuing veneration of Obama for his brown skin alone shows that we remain in the Dark Ages where racial politics are concerned, not that we’ve come any way at all. The identitarian blight we suffer is a liberal invention, btw, not a conservative one.

So its your supposition that Asians and Hispanics benefited greatly from Slavery, just not as much as whites? Its not like they suffered any discrimination themselves…

Charting up a list of crimes of the US against any group to see who gets to shed the biggest tears doesn’t help any of those groups. In fact, it help no one but the 1%. There is a very simple reason all these things are possible, from lynchings to interment camps to whole sale genocide. None of those people care enough about each other to stand side by side. They’d rather whine about how much worse off they are. They have no power and their own prejudices prevent them from getting power– real power comes from numbers and solidarity. Its not a new phenomenon. Its been happening since before “slaves” every came to America.

There is a reason for the DIVIDE in Divide and Conquer. If you and others like you continue to not understand that, we will all collectively continue to suffer.

These high-risk loan pools were high risk not because of the type of loan taken out, out because of WHO took them out. In other words, they were high risk because the borrowers over-reached and took out more than they could afford. They also deluded themselves into believing that “house prices always go up”, so that they had not a care in the world that ARMs and “negative amortization loans” would come back to bite them in the ass.

Now, you can say that the lenders should not have pushed these loans, but don’t let the borrowers off the hook. By and large they knew damn well that they were playing a game and taking a risk.

Do I feel sorry that families lost their homes because the bubble burst? Yes. Do I absolve them of guilt in the matter? Hell No.

I agree, I haven’t forgotten how he pushed that 700 billion bailout when he was Senator Obama and Henry Paulson presented the Bush Bailout. He got that Republican bailout through faster than I’ve ever seen anything go through.

excluding the now evaporated and illusory home equity and focusing on the more substantial measure of net financial assets the black/white wealth gap actually widened significantly under Clinton. See figure 1 on this page:

Slack thinking that imputes arguments I did not make. The simple fact is that Black people are suffering disproportionately–in relation to whites–in the current crisis, as they have historically. I nowhere stated OR inferred anything about other minority people(s). In fact, if you had read at all carefully you’d have noted that I went out of my way to note that President Obama has not helped poor people period.

It does not follow–ever–that an expression of concern for one group of people who are being harmed by government policy is somehow an attempt to divide poor or working people, etc. I’m sure you know that’s nonsense.

Lenders are the ones who led borrowers to believe housing prices would always go up, and pressured people into mortgages and home equity loans that lenders knew borrowers wouldn’t be able to repay. It’s not unreasonable to expect many borrowers would believe a lender on something that would appear to be within the lender’s area of expertise.

However, regardless of how you apportion blame for bad loans, if people who made bad loans lost their homes and lenders who made bad loans ate their losses that wouldn’t have been the crisis we had. Instead we had much bigger crisis because of the securitization of the loans, and bets on the value of the securities. Relative to the subject of this post, I’m suggesting that the loss in wealth isn’t just individual borrowers who made bad loans losing their homes. It’s also due to loss in equity for all homeowners, unemployment leading to more loss, “austerity” programs that contribute to neighborhood decay, etc. that are the result of a crisis that borrowers didn’t cause, and a response to the crisis that furthered the upward transfer of wealth.